Friday, April 12, 2013

Guest Rant: Everything I Know About Football from Someone Who Knows Absolutely Nothing About Football

I recently discovered my coworker – the lovely Cecilia Tomahawk – knew almost nothing about Packers or the NFL despite having lived in Wisconsin her entire life. At first, I thought she was joking but after a few simple questions, it was quite clear her personal Packerpedia was remarkably limited. You could fill the internets three times over with the amount of football knowledge Ms. Tomahawk doesn’t know, so instead, I asked her to tell me exactly what she knows – or thinks she knows – about the sport. Here is what she said.

Everything I Know About Football from Someone Who Knows Absolutely Nothing About Football

· During a football game, which team players are on is indicated by the color of the stripe down the side of their intensely tight pants.

· Televised football games are things that occur between installments of me watching Amy Poehler and Alec Baldwin in commercials.

· When football games are televised in bars or restaurants, I’ve noticed that there is a direct correlation between the local team playing well and the number of free shots I receive. The general mood of the crowd seems to be affected directly by this as well.

· When family and friends gather to watch football games my older female relatives are perpetually in search of some heroic romantic figure who goes by the name Donald Driver – although, wait a minute, is he around anymore? I think he left.

· “Fantasy Football” is a misleading term, if you ask me. It leads a person to believe that the activity so named will be fantastical, intriguing or exotic in nature. It does not imply that people will systematically form fictional teams in their minds and then proceed to lose money in fantasy football leagues.

· There are things called brackets that people set up so they can track which teams are winning and losing at various points in the season. This is actually not the first type of brackets I was familiar with, however. In college a large group of my friends would play a game that we called Brackets. It was highly entertaining because we would pit random things against each other like Peanut Butter vs. Jelly, or Batman vs. Oprah, or Battleship vs. Connect Four. And I enjoyed it because we conducted lengthy, passionate debates that ended in clear winners and losers with the winning items moving up in the tournament.

· I love the Puppy Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday, but I don’t like to admit it because there’s nothing more clichéd or stereotypical than a girl yelling, “Oooh! Puppies! They’re so adorable!” in the middle of a football game.

· This March, my best friend picked her teams for her office bracket using the construct of whose team mascot would win in a fight. I think this is genius. Though now upon second thought, that applied to college basketball and not professional football. I still think it’s a good idea, but do NFL teams have mascots? I honestly don’t have a clue.

· Clay Matthews’ hair is too long. Some of the ladies definitely disagree with me on this, I know. But it’s not a good look, man. You need to cut your hair.

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